Dylan's Visions of Sin (83 page)

369
See footnote,
see this page
.

370
Visions of Johanna
, when sung in Los Angeles (30 November 1965) and in New York (21 January 1966).

371
To J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818;
Letters
, vol. I,
see this page
. Keats’s spelling is retained.

372
Dylan does not have to owe to anyone his title for the album on which
Not Dark Yet
appeared:
Time Out of Mind
. But
Beckett’s
Lessness
opens: “Ruins true refuge long last towards which so many false time out of mind”. And it includes: “Blacked out fallen open true refuge issueless towards
which so many false time out of mind”.
Lessness
consists of twenty-four paragraphs or blocks (one for each hour of all day), and of sixty sentences, each of which comes twice (minutes and
seconds).

373
TLS
(24 December 1925, 25 July 1929); for the contexts, see Eliot’s
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917
(ed. Christopher Ricks, 1996), p. xxviii.

374
On the stage fight, or staged fight, “Keats vs Dylan”, see Michael Gray, who points out that it was in 1992 that the
playwright David Hare set up this show.

Never mind that Bob Dylan had spent the previous three decades with his face set firmly against the vulgar and the cheap, or indeed that John Keats had been a cockney oik and
upstart himself. Such was the climate of opinion still that Hare’s comically inaccurate personifying of the divide caught on like a pop craze itself. Within minutes, that doyenne of the
literary clerisy, A. S. Byatt, could go on B.B.C.’s all-purpose arts programme,
The Late Show
, and pronounce that the qualitative difference between Keats and Dylan is that with Keats, she
could take you through one of his poems and reveal many layers . . . She couldn’t take you through a Dylan lyric because she wouldn’t know where to begin. What’s disgraceful is
not the preference for Keats, nor the ignorance about Dylan: it is the malappropriate self-confidence.

(
Song and Dance Man III
, p. xviii)

Gray, with appropriate self-confidence, remarks that it was (in the year 2000) nearly thirty years since he began to argue “the case for Dylan’s being, if you must,
on the same side as Keats”.

375
Than I can bear
may carry something of the sin that is often in Dylan’s mind, the sin of Cain: “And Cain said unto
the L
ORD
, My punishment is greater than I can bear” (Genesis 4:13).

376
London (4 October 1997);
Isis
(October 1997).
USA Today
(28 September 1997): “Making
Time Out of Mind
was a liberating
experience for Dylan who can feel burdened by the weight of his legend.”

377
See footnote,
see this page
, on Beckett’s
Lessness
.

378
Lancelot Andrewes
(1926);
Selected Essays
,
see this page
.

379
Rolling Stone
(22 November 2001).

380
The
OED
records that Fielding and Gibbon in the eighteenth century tried “fortitudinous”. But the language
wasn’t having it.

381
Athenaeum
(11 April 1919).

382
Argufying
, ed. John Haffenden (1987),
see this page
, a letter from Empson;
Argufying
,
see this page
;
Using Biography
(1984),
see this page
, from an essay on Fielding published in 1958.

383
Baudelaire
(1930);
Selected Essays
(1932, 1951 edition), p. 421.

384
TLS
(11 August 1927).

385
Newsweek
(6 October 1997), on Dylan.

386
Michael Goldberg,
New Musical Express
(November 1979).

387
Biograph
’s ellipsis.

388
OED
, “unfaith”: lack of faith or belief, esp. in religion. From 1415, and including Tennyson: “Faith and
Unfaith can ne’er be equal powers”. But there is no instance since 1870, and the word would now feel strained.

389
Philip Massinger
(1920);
Selected Essays
,
see this page
.

390
Further Requirements
, ed. Anthony Thwaite (2001), p. 39.

391
To Dixon, 23 October 1881;
The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon
, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott
(1935, 1955 edition),
see this page
.

392
Don’t you know?
This should not be news to you, given Ecclesiastes 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which
shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”

393
Interview with Kurt Loder,
Rolling Stone
(21 June 1984).

394
The
OED
citations include E. H. Gombrich,
Art and Illusion
(1960): “What is called
‘synesthesia’, the splashing over of impressions from one sense modality to another, is a fact to which all languages testify.”

395
As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
(1985), simply, singly, “they say, ‘All is well’”.

396
OED
, “square-eyed”: “
jocular
, affected by or given to excessive viewing of television” (1976).
One of the television reviewers in
Private Eye
bears the name Square Eyes.

397
Dylan sings “torch”; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
“touch”.

398
Precious Angel
, “so let us not be enticed”;
T.V. Talkin’ Song,
“It will lead you into some
strange pursuits, / Lead you to the land of forbidden fruits”.
T.V. Talkin’ Song,
“His voice was ringing loud”; Revelation, “And I saw an angel standing in the
sun; and he cried with a loud voice.” The phrase “There’s violence in the eyes” swerves from the expected body-parts: “The violence of your hands” (Psalms 58:2);
“the act of violence is in their hands” (Isaiah 59:6).

399
“An artificial channel for the conveyance of water. The alternate rhymes in lines 5 and 10 suggest the turning of the
pipes ‘up’ or ‘down’.” John Tobin,
George Herbert: The Complete English Poems
(1991).

400
New York Times
(29 September 1997).

401
For “know no”, in relation to both the negative and the positive, see the discussion of
Blind Willie McTell
(
see this page
), with
Paradise Lost
: “No happier state, and know to know no more”.

402
Epistle to the Hebrews 10:31.

403
Rolling Stone
(22 November 2001).

404
For “’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to” (
I Believe in You
),
see this
page
.

405
OED
36a, “used with a future date following as subject . . . ‘come Easter’;
i.e.
let Easter come, when Easter
shall come”. The first citation is 1420: “twenty year come Easter”. Come Easter; that is, “come the resurrection”.

406
In the penultimate verse, what is printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
is “Well, the devil’s shining light, it can be
most blinding”, but he sings “. . . that can be most blinding”.

407
The sequence is
forgiven / living; sleeping / weeping
;
resurrection / protection
;
blinding / finding
; but then
fake it / make
it
.

408
The sequence:
apology / me
;
eternity / me
;
be / me
;
vanity / me
; and then
Calvary / me
.

409
New York Times
(29 September 1961).

410
18 September 1980.

411
As performed on
Planet Waves
(reissued on
Biograph
), the song swerves within the second line. Dylan sings “You angel
you” but follows this by starting upon “You’re as . . .” (“You’re as fine as anything’s fine”); he splits the second, and proceeds, “got me
under your wing”. The recovery is so prompt as to make the slip of the lip all but imperceptible. There is something simply unfussed (and delightfully appropriate to the spirit of the song)
in his letting it stand, in his letting it go. Not at all “Go to hell”, this unruffled imperfectionism, rather “Go to Heaven, there’s an angel”.

412
For
Lay, Lady, Lay
and Dylan’s sense of how it sprang from the fillers “la la la”,
see this
page
.

413
I Shall Be Released
.

414
He sings “Yes I never did feel . . .”; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “Never did feel . . .”
(which is what he sings in the return of the bridge). And he sings “Never did get up and walk the floor”; as printed, “I get up at night and walk the floor”.

415
Dylan sings it so; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “The way you talk and the way you walk / It sure plays on my
mind”. The word “plays” plays along nicely with the talk of singing, but perhaps the punning suggestion then of “preys on my mind” has a darkness out of place in light
of the song. “
Mama
, you been on my mind” is transformed, in Dylan’s memory, into “your
memory
on my mind”.

416
On seeing and hearing, there is a good junction in Alex Ross (
New Yorker
, 10 May 1999): “I had just seen Dylan sing
Hattie
Carroll
, in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give.”

417
He sings this; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
it says “It says everything”.

418
Bob Fass Show
(WBAI-FM, New York, January 1966).

419
John Haffenden,
The Life of John Berryman
(1982), p. 353.

420
As to “on the ground”, Dylan sings with special tenderness Willie Nelson’s
Angel Flying Too Close to the
Ground
(B-side of a single, 1983). She, an angel (not a raven) with a broken wing, is grounded for a while.

421
Lamia
, I, 328–32.

422
To Dixon, 26 September 1881;
The Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon
,
see this page
.

423
Tight Connection (Has Anybody Seen My Love)
.

424
On the antiphonal in Dylan’s songs, and particularly in
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
,
see this
page
. As to Dylan’s taking the dramatic role of a woman in a song, singing so throughout, there is (of his songs) only
North Country Blues
: “As I quit in the spring / To marry John
Thomas, a miner”.
House of the Rising Sun
(which he sings feelingly but which is not his song) is likewise in a woman’s voice throughout: “It’s been the ruin of many a poor
girl, / And me, O God, I’m one”.

425
They give pain in Goethe’s
Faust
(Part 1, line 1, 913), as Levi Dalton pointed out to me. Mikhail Bulgakov,
The Master and
Margarita
: “‘And what is this on her foot?’ asked Margarita, tirelessly offering her hand to the guests who had overtaken the hobbling Madame Tofana . . . ‘On her foot,
Queen, she has a Spanish boot’ . . . The Spanish boot interfered with her movement” (tr. Mirra Ginsburg, 1995,
see this page
).

426
As
Blackjack Davey
, on
Good as I Been to You
. “Pull off, pull off them high-heeled shoes / All made of Spanish
leather”. A present. Hers, not His. Shoes, not boots.

427
These things are the creations of convention, granted, but then conventions are themselves creations: the convention by which a
man sings as a woman or vice versa, or the convention that presents an alternation of speakers in one voice throughout. For my part, I am disconcerted or discomposed by the Dylan / Johnny Cash duet
in
Girl of the North Country
(on
Nashville Skyline
). Dylan just about saves the day by pushing his voice up so as maximally to distinguish its young love from the male stubble of Cash’s
voice. True, when Dylan and Cash fool around with
One Too Many Mornings
, as you can hear them doing on bootleg tapes (“You are right from your side, Bob, / And I am right from mine”),
it is a different story, a funny story.

428
Dryden’s translation of the
Aeneid
(XI, 890–91): “Unspoiled shall be her arms, and unprofaned / Her holy limbs
with any human hand”.

429
On feminine and masculine endings, see the commentary on
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
,
see this
page
.

430
The rhymes are: verse 1,
morning / landing
. Verse 2,
ownin’ / ocean
. Verse 3,
golden / Barcelona
. Verse 4,
ocean /
ownin’
. Verse 5,
askin’ / passin’
. Verse 6,
sorrow / tomorrow
. Verse 7,
sailin’ / feelin’
. Verse 8,
roamin’ / goin’
. Verse 9,
weather / leather
. The
repetition in verse 4,
ocean / ownin’
, of verse 2,
ownin’ / ocean
, a repetition with a reversal, suggests (Jim McCue suggests to me) that things – becalmed – aren’t
going anywhere, although she is; the plea is repeated, unheeded.

431
The land of the ballad always welcomes visitors from the land of nursery rhymes.

Furthermore, “Made of silver or of golden” may be coloured with
ore
, and may be heading for Barcelona, a gold
bar
.

432
Something similar is achieved in the lines from
Farewell
quoted on
see this page
: “I’m bound
off for the bay of Mexico / Or maybe the coast of Californ” – where California, being lopped of its last two letters, becomes a masculine ending: “Californ”.